


A View of the Streets

by Sweety_Mutant



Category: The Great Escape (1963)
Genre: (implied) - Freeform, (kinda...) - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Friendship/Love, Gen, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Romantic Friendship, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 16:11:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8216305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sweety_Mutant/pseuds/Sweety_Mutant
Summary: They had survived, were alive and home. It just did not feel right.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nkrockz23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nkrockz23/gifts).



> Here it is my darling! I hope you like my answer to your prompt, which roughly was: "can you do a Roger/Mac AU where they live? :P"  
> I tried fluff, ended up with angst. Old habits die hard... sorry dear. I really want my two little cupcakes to be happy, but I cannot write happy things!  
> Also, I wanted it to be more "shippy", but it somehow did not feel right, so I stayed safe with subtext. We use our imagination :p
> 
> Disclaimer here. I don't own TGE. Well well...
> 
> Enjoy reading!

During his first nights back at home, in his home flat, Roger could not sleep anymore. Everything felt foreign, and so wrong when it should have been right. Mac often visited him. He lived not far away, but not so close as to come every day. They talked, through silence and shared glances that weighed more than words, as if they could not afford words. They shared nightmares and thoughts and sleepless days, and Mac unofficially moved in a few months after the war ended.  
Nobody questioned it.  
It was easier that way, both for him and Roger. For a few years, they had relied on each other so much that it had become a tacit co-dependency. Neither of them had been ready to let go yet, and, back in a country they did not recognize anymore, they needed something familiar to hold onto. Something tangible, warm and safe, something of a lifeline, some air to breathe. So much had happened. So many men had died. Yet they were still alive. Painfully alive. They had made it back home and sometimes, in the dark of the night, felt like trespassers.    


Sometimes, Mac and Roger would simply look outside of a window of Roger’s flat, one that had a street view. They watched people, a question hanging between them. A question they had not dared to voice. How? Why us? They had been some of the POWs that had the biggest chance of success. They had also been some of the most hunted, the biggest hazard as somebody had said to Roger.  
But voicing the question would be stepping on the dead’s graves. It would be questioning the sacrifices. The sacrifices of their friends, and all the silent others.

It was life, war and peace. It was life and war criminals were hanged every day. Those were austere times. From the window, they looked at a street full of rubble, London the home of scrawny ghosts.

They had been away from the war, so far away, when in the camp… or had they been trap in some twisted alternate reality, where life and happiness meant something else? Was it just a sick feeling that went along with coming home? Were they heroes or some kind of indirect murderers? Mac would never ever come to think that Roger was a murderer. He had only catalysed the men’s thirst for freedom, their need to fight? He was not, and would never be responsible for their deaths. Yet, some people would say so. Were they bitter, sad, mourning, or looking through another perspective? Looking through the eyes of bombed innocents or grieving parents? It did not matter to Mac. What mattered was that Roger, who had already had enough trouble burying his friends and living with his guilt, was only given more reasons to feel guilty.  
This life went on for weeks and months, and its stillness began to worry Mac more and more. His rational mind told him to wait and see. To take time, because accepting victory, accepting survival was difficult, he himself knew it. He could not ask Roger to… put the past behind and forget. He struggled too, on a daily basis, but he willed himself to move on, refusing to let the darker, sad side take over him. At least one of them smiled. It was altogether too familiar.  
The one who smiles and the ones who broods.  
The nice one and the rough one.  
War had changed them so much, they would never ever go back to who they were before. Sometimes, Mac believed in his own mask, for the sake of them both.

Yet the fateful question still hanged. It hanged during the day, it hanged like their uniforms behind the door. It hanged at night, from the ceiling, when none of them could find sleep, immobile, silent, a few centimetres away from each other yet so cold.

Why were they alive? Why were they alive, if only to stay in the dark?  
One morning, Mac awoke to find Roger looking at nothing out of the window. He looked, and there was indeed nothing to see, nothing new. He said nothing, waiting. Roger’s voice broke the morning’s silence:

“Why…” Mac held his breath. _I don’t know why we are still alive._ He was not ready to face this question. Yet, he let Roger talk. Mac could have shushed him, but he did not have the heart to do so. “Why am I not able to live anymore?”  
Mac had not expected this question. It was the answer to the fateful question. It was the right thing, the only thing that could be asked.  
Mac sat down beside Roger. Many answers came to his mind, but none felt right.  
They had, against all odds, survived, and it all went to this. Not why had they survived, but what to do after. How to live.  
Mac pulled Roger closer by the shoulders. A familiar contact, normal in the camp, unthinkable here in the outside world. Mac felt hands grip at his own. He rested his head against Roger’s, eyes closed, and it was comfort enough. Against Roger’s hair, his lips formed silently the answer to the question.  


**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked this fic, feel free to leave a kudo or comment if you want a happy author!


End file.
